A project is a set of digital images that are related in some manner. A project may include, for example, all photos taken on a particular day, on a particular location, or at a particular event. A project may also be all photos downloaded at the same time from a particular device, such as a digital camera. The project(s) to which a digital image belongs is typically determined based on metadata associated with the image. Such metadata may explicitly establish an image-to-project mapping (e.g. photo X belongs to project Y), or may be used as a factor to indirectly determine the project for the image. For example, the day/time that a photo was taken may be stored as metadata, and an image management application may automatically establish all photos taken on a particular day as a project.
It is often desirable to compare digital images with other digital images. For example, when selecting which digital images from a photo shoot to include in a magazine, or brochure, it is important to be able to look at the candidate photos together, to decide between them. Consequently, most image management applications include a feature that allows digital images to be concurrently displayed to facilitate side-by-side comparisons between photos.
While comparing individual photos to individual photos is relatively easy, comparing entire projects to other entire projects is not so straightforward. For example, many image management applications allow users to view thumbnails of the images that belong to a project. However, even in views where the images of a project are displayed as thumbnails, the emphasis of the display is clearly to facilitate consideration of individual photos, not the project as a whole. For example, the size of the thumbnails is typically chosen so that the user can clearly discern the content of the individual images. Consequently, for projects that have large numbers of photos, only a small subset of the photos will fit on the screen at any given time. To see all the photos in the project, the user has to scroll or page through many screens. To compare two large projects, the user has to first browse through several pages of thumbnails of the photos for one project, and then browse through several pages of thumbnails of photos for the other project.
Further, such thumbnail views typically display information about the individual photos adjacent to the thumbnails. The individual-photo metadata displayed adjacent to the thumbnails typically includes the name of the image, and may also include information such as the date the photo was taken, the resolution of the photo, the photographer, etc.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.